Introducing Cloudera Desktop

Today at Hadoop World NYC, we’re announcing the availability of Cloudera Desktop, a unified and extensible graphical user interface for Hadoop. The product is free to download and can be used with either internal clusters or clusters running on public clouds.

At Cloudera, we’re focused on making Hadoop easy to install, configure, manage, and use for all organizations. While there exist many utilities for developers who work with Hadoop, Cloudera Desktop is targeting beginning developers and non-developers in an organization who’d like to get value from the data stored in their Hadoop cluster. By working within a web browser, users avoid the tedious client installation and upgrade cycle, and system administrators avoid custom firewall configurations.

We’ve worked closely with the MooTools community to create a desktop environment inside of a web browser that should be familiar to navigate for most users. The desktop environment has other advantages: it’s extensible to hundreds of applications and allows for data to be shared between applications.

Initial applications for Cloudera Desktop include:

File Browser: The File Browser application lets you navigate your Hadoop Distributed File System as easily as your local file system. You can browse the directory structure, examine file contents, rename files and directories, and upload files from within your web browser.

Job Browser: The Job Browser enables you to examine the past and present of your MapReduce cluster in detail. Follow the progress of running jobs, debug failed jobs, and get more details on historical job performance.

Cluster Health: Learn the state of your cluster from a glance with the Cluster Health application. A wide variety of metrics are collected and displayed in real time to help you pin down problems with your cluster. Define custom checks for non-healthy states and ensure that you catch minor problems before they become major.

Job Designer: Create MapReduce job designs for commonly run jobs and save them for reuse later or by other users. Submit jobs to your MapReduce cluster from your browser.

We expect to deliver several more applications over the coming months, and we’re working with a few partners to standardize the API for building Desktop applications so that any software developer can build applications for Cloudera Desktop. If you’re interested in developing on Cloudera Desktop, drop us a note at desktop-api-subscribe@cloudera.com.

Cloudera Desktop currently works with the latest testing release of Cloudera’s Distribution for Hadoop, and we’re working with the Apache Hadoop community to get our patches into the Apache project as well